Ladies’ Night at Ace Hardware

It started fast one day—too hot, too cold—

we couldn’t thermostat. We wandered

aisles of mechanical things,

inventions of hold & holding in,

wondering at the nature

of control, how the Stoics believed that good

was absence of pain, stasis.

How they must have treated their bodies

like guardrails, braced & ready

for impact. Was it safety measure,

deterrent, or warning? We don’t know

anything more natural than a body in pain,

no better teacher than change.

We feel too much to have entered

this world as absence,

after all, we began curled up, practicing crash

positions, hearts cradled inside by claws & wings

not thrumming outside

our bodies. Even the word nostalgia

originates with 17th century mercenaries

meaning to return home & pain.

If there is only one day,

taken away at dusk & returned at dawn,

what true threshold can we invent?

So, we look for signs like Ladies’ Night

at the local Ace Hardware, & wonder how

to accessorize with what is given: split lips

& plumbs, Draino of Want.

Kara Dorris is the author of Have Ruin, Will Travel (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or please unwrap me] co-written with Gwendolyn Paradice (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, I-70 Review, Rising Phoenix, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, Tinderbox, Puerto del Sol, The Tulane Review, and Crazyhorse, among others literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, Waxwing, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.